Playing
below the poverty line: Investigating an online game as a way to
reduce prejudice toward the poor

Gina
Roussos, John F. Dovidio

Department
of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

Abstract

A plethora of
research indicates that viewing media can reduce prejudice. Emerging
work on computer gaming shows that games can also influence social
attitudes. The present studies investigated the influence of an
interactive computer game about living in poverty on attitudes and
beliefs about the poor. Playing the poverty game was compared to
playing a control game and merely observing the poverty game. In
Study 1, playing an interactive poverty game did not influence
attitudes while watching someone else play the game increased
positive attitudes, empathic concern, and support for
government-funded anti-poverty policies. In Study 2, meritocracy
beliefs moderated the influence of the game; people lower in
meritocracy showed less positive attitudes toward the poor after
playing the poverty game. This effect was mediated by an increase in
the belief that poverty is personally controllable. Future
directions for and implications of studying the unique intergroup
effects of games are discussed.

Introduction

The
media has a profound impact on the way individuals think and feel
about social groups (Mutz & Goldman, 2010). Past research on how
media can influence social beliefs has focused on such traditional
media forms as radio (Paluck, 2009), storybooks (Cameron, Rutland,
Hossain, & Petley, 2011), television (Schiappa, Gregg, &
Hewes, 2005), and film (Riggle, Ellis, & Crawford, 1996).
Computer gaming, which engages people more actively and immerses
them more in the events than does traditional media (Jenkins, 2003),
has recently started to receive more research attention (cf.
Burgess, Dill, Stermer, Burgess, & Brown, 2011) due its broad
popularity (Kain, 2012). This recent work reveals that playing video
and computer games can influence prosocial behavior and intergroup
beliefs and attitudes (Adachi, Hodson, Willoughby, & Zanette,
2014; Anderson & Bushman, 2001; Gehlbach et al., 2015). For
example, playing a violent video game as a Black (vs. White) avatar
increases negative attitudes toward Black people and reinforces the
stereotype that Black people are violent (Yang, Gibson, Lueke,
Huesmann, & Bushman, 2014). When Israeli Jews and Palestinians
played an educational game about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
they showed a more nuanced understanding of the conflict and more
positive attitudes toward the other group (Kampf, 2015; Kampf &
Cuhadar, 2015). Studying the effects of gaming is even more
important now because games are increasingly available for free to
anyone with internet access (H2 Gambling Capital, 2015). The current
research, consisting of two studies, examined how the fundamental
aspects of online gaming can affect attitudes toward the poor.

A
plethora of past research indicates that many Americans hold
negative attitudes toward the poor (Cozzarelli, Wilkinson, &
Tagler, 2001; Tagler & Cozzarelli, 2013). The poor are
consistently stereotyped as dishonest, lazy, and dependent (Gorski,
2011). Work by Rank, Yoon, and Hirschl (2003) reveals that when
people are asked to explain why poverty exists, they make internal
attributions (i.e., blaming the poor individuals) significantly more
often than external attributions (i.e., blaming the government or
society). People generally cite irresponsibility and laziness as
reasons for poverty (Soss & Schram, 2007). This attribution of
controllability to poverty is significant because stigmas perceived
as more controllable elicit more negative attitudes (Graham, Weiner
& Zucker, 1997).

Addressing
individuals’ beliefs about poor people is important because
these beliefs can have significant consequences for individuals
living in poverty. For example, anti-poor attitudes affect
policy-makers’ and politicians’ willingness to support
government funded anti-poverty policies such as welfare and food
stamps (Cozzarelli et al., 2001). These policies could significantly
improve the lives of the current 15.8% percent of Americans living
below the poverty line, considering that people in poverty have
limited access to good food, health care, and clean air (Bishaw &
Fontenot, 2014; Mukherjee, 2013). In the present research, we
examined computer games as a possible way to reduce anti-poor
attitudes.

In
examining the literature on prejudice reduction, two contrasting
perspectives emerge for how playing a computer game about poverty
might influence attitudes toward the poor and support for policies
that benefit poor people. The first perspective emphasizes how
playing a computer game could promote empathic emotions
(Greitemeyer, Osswald, & Brauer, 2010). Computer games are
interactive and immersive in a way that narratives in traditional
forms of media are not: Players both “perform [and] witness
narrative events” (Jenkins, 2003, p. 124). Thus, one way
playing computer games might reduce prejudice towards poor people is
by allowing players to take on the perspective of a poor person.
Stephan and Finlay (1999) showed that being instructed to adopt the
perspective of a member of a stigmatized group can arouse a range of
sympathetic emotions (see also Pedersen, Beven, Walker, &
Griffiths, 2004), and Batson et al. (1997) found that specifically
inducing feelings of empathic concern (e.g., feeling sympathetic and
compassionate) by instructing participants to imagine the feelings
of a member of a stigmatized group produced more positive attitudes
toward the group as a whole (see also Todd, Bodenhausen, Richeson, &
Galinsky, 2011).

Computer
games may be particularly effective at improving intergroup
attitudes and reducing prejudice by inducing empathic concern given
their interactive and engaging nature (Klimmt, Hartmann, & Frey,
2007). Games’ interactivity and immersiveness increase their
ability to impact players’ emotions and cognitions (Madsen,
2016; Yeh, 2015). When the player becomes immersed in the game and
in the lives of its characters, this helps the player see through
the eyes of the character and imagine how a poor person feels
(Batson et al., 1997; Mutz & Goldman, 2010). Past work shows
that perspective-taking exercises in which participants observe the
misfortunes of a member of an out-group leads to increased empathic
concern and thus positive attitudes toward that out-group (Dovidio
et al., 2004). Work by Gehlbach et al. (2015) confirms that playing
a perspective-taking computer game positively influences intergroup
interactions. Thus, to the extent that playing an interactive
computer game about the threat of experiencing poverty promotes
empathic concern, it can lead to less prejudice toward poor people
(Batson et al., 1997).

Although
the research on empathic concern paints a rosy picture for how
computer games might be used to reduce prejudice (Mutz &
Goldman, 2010; Wang, Ku, Tai, & Galinsky, 2013), research in the
area of stigma controllability suggests that these games might have
the opposite effect (Weiner, Perry, & Magnusson, 1988). This
second perspective emphasizes how playing a game about poverty might
lead players to believe that poverty is personally controllable.
Computer games arouse a sense of personal agency and control (Klimmt
et al., 2007). They involve a series of decisions and behaviors;
they are “enacted” stories that emphasize the role of
decisions and choices on outcomes (Jenkins, 2003). A player in game
feels that they have complete control over the game outcomes,
because the game outcomes are a direct result of their decisions.
Past research has established that when a stigma is perceived to be
controllable (implying that stigmatized members are to blame for
their situation), that stigma elicits more negative attitudes than
when a stigma is perceived to be uncontrollable (Puhl &
Brownell, 2003; Tyrrell, Hetz, Barg, & Latimer, 2010). Thus, to
the extent that playing a computer game emphasizes personal control
and thus the blameworthiness of the stigma (in this case, poverty),
it can lead to more negative attitudes.

It
is important to study how online games influence intergroup
attitudes because of a current trend to create games with the
intention of reducing bias and increasing empathy. While many of
these prosocial games are based on psychological research and have
had their effects empirically tested (Belman & Flanagan, 2010;
Flanagan, Howe, & Nissenbaum, 2005; Kaufman & Flanagan,
2015), many other games are created and disseminated without having
their ability to reduce bias tested. For example, Gamesforchange.org
is a website launched in 2004 with the mission of “catalyzing
social impact through digital games” (Games for Change, 2015).
The website currently hosts over 100 games that address topics such
as poverty, mental illness stigma, and illegal immigration. These
games are being promoted as a new method of attitude change despite
the lack of evidence that they actually work. In the present
research, in two studies, we investigated one of the games hosted on
Gamesforchange.com called SPENT and how it influences attitudes
toward the poor.

Study 1

Study
1 examined how playing a game about poverty can uniquely influence
attitudes toward the poor by comparing participants who played a
poverty game to participants who watched a video of the poverty game
as well as to participants in a control condition. SPENT is an
interactive poverty simulation game in which players start out with
$1,000 and engage in daily financial decisions with the goal of
making it to the end of 30 days with money left in their bank
account. Participants in the Game condition played SPENT whereas
participants in the Observation condition watched a video recording
of someone else playing SPENT. Participants in the Control condition
played a game about preparing for natural disasters.

As
noted earlier, playing a computer game about poverty could have two
different, and potentially countervailing effects. On the one hand,
playing a game about poverty could increase empathic concern for the
poor, which could reduce prejudice against poor people (Batson &
Moran, 1999). On the other hand, playing a game about poverty,
because it emphasizes decision-making by the player, could increase
perceptions of the personal controllability of poverty, thus
increasing stigmatization of the poor (Tyrrell et al., 2010). We
therefore examined how playing a computer game about poverty affects
people’s empathic concern for the poor, beliefs about the
controllability of poverty, attitudes toward the poor, and support
for anti-poverty government policies. While attitudes toward
out-groups and support for government policies to help those
out-groups are correlated, past work has shown them to be
conceptually distinct (Dixon, Durrheim, & Tredoux, 2007).

To
the extent that observing the unique challenges that members of
stigmatized groups experience encourages perspective taking (Shih,
Wang, Bucher, & Stotzer, 2009) and arouses empathic concern
(Batson & Moran, 1999), both participants who watch a video of
the poverty game and those who play the poverty game themselves were
expected to experience higher levels of empathic concern than
participants in the control condition. Greater empathic concern, in
turn, was expected to lead to more positive attitudes toward the
group and efforts to benefit members of the group (Batson et al.,
1997).

In
addition, because playing the game actively engages participants
directly in making economic decisions and seeing contingent
outcomes, we expected that participants who played the game would
also believe that poverty is more controllable than would
participants in the control condition. Greater attribution of
controllability of a group for its stigmatized condition predicts
more negative attitudes toward the group (Graham et al., 1997) and
less support for government-funded policies to improve the condition
of the group (Cozzarelli et al., 2001).

By
contrast, we expected that, because perspective taking leads to more
external attributions for another’s condition, participants
who observed the game could potentially show a weaker belief in the
personal controllability of poverty compared to participants in the
control condition. Although observing someone else play the game in
the role of a person in poverty could lead to stronger dispositional
attributions, which people often make when they observe others
(Jones & Nisbett, 1972; cf. Malle, 2006; Malle, Knobe, &
Nelson, 2007), Vescio, Sechrist, and Paolucci (2003) demonstrated
that adopting, the perspective of a member of another group leads to
less prejudice not only because of increased empathic concern but
also because of increased situational attributions (i.e., decreased
internal attributions; see Storms, 1973) for the adversity faced by
members of the out-group.

Taken
together, these lines of reasoning suggest that compared to
participants in the control condition, observing the poverty game
(SPENT) would lead to more positive attitudes toward the poor and
more support for policies benefiting the poor because these
participants would experience higher levels of empathic concern
(Batson & Ahmad, 2001) and possibly, based on Vescio et al.’s
(2003) paper, believe that poverty is less personally controllable.
However, compared to the control condition, playing the poverty game
(SPENT), could increase empathic concern for the group but at the
same time, because of the salience of personal economic choices in
the game, also increase belief in the personal controllability of
poverty. Because empathic concern produces more positive
orientations whereas controllability beliefs produce more negative
orientations, playing SPENT may not influence attitudes toward the
poor and support for policies to benefit the poor, relative to the
control condition. We thus investigated not only the outcomes
(attitudes toward the poor and support for policies to alleviate the
negative impact of poverty) but also the processes leading to these
outcomes.

Method

Participants.
American
Mechanical Turk workers over 18 were recruited on Mturk.com to
participate in a study entitled “Online Gaming and Thought
Processes.” There were 227 participants. Of these 227, 51.5%
were men. Fifty-five percent held a two or four-year college degree
and 27.3% completed some college but did not get a degree. Average
age was 35 years (SD
= 11 years) and ages ranged from 18 to 72 years. Average income was
$36,964 (SD
= $37,596). Using an $18,850 yearly salary as the poverty cut-off
value for the average American household (United States Census
Bureau, 2014, 2015), 27% (n
= 62) of participants were impoverished. Seventy-seven point one
percent of participants identified as White, 7.9% were African
American, another 7.9% were Hispanic, and 5.3% were Asian or Pacific
Islander. All participants who completed the study were included in
the analyses. We arrived at our sample size by conducting a power
analysis using G*power (Faul, Erdfelder, Buchner, & Lang, 2009).
Setting a medium effect size, f
= .25, the power analysis indicated that to examine mean differences
between three groups we would need a sample size of 252. Our final
sample size of 227 approached this number.

Experimental
conditions.
Participants played different games
in the experimental conditions. In the control condition,
participants played the online game Stop Disasters created by the
United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction. In this game,
participants are given a population and are told to put structures
(like hospitals) and plant-life (like trees) in place to protect the
population from an impending natural disaster (such as a flood).
After preparing the town, participants start the disaster and see
how well the town holds up. The game takes about ten minutes to
play. After finishing the game, participants answered a number of
comprehension check questions such as “what type of natural
disaster are you trying to protect the town from?” This game
was chosen as the control because we found it is as engaging and
interactive as SPENT and because it shared SPENT’s focus on
making decisions to achieve a certain outcome.

In
the game-playing condition, participants played the interactive
online poverty game, SPENT. SPENT was chosen as the treatment game
because it is a highly popular computer game (played over one
million times as of 2011; Urban Ministries of Durham, 2011)
presented as an effective way to reduce prejudice against the poor.
It was designed by an advertising agency in 2011 with the goal of
promoting empathy and liking for the poor. The group created the
game’s situations with input from local case workers and
people living in homeless shelters (Flandez, 2011). It is an
interactive and immersive way for participants to come to understand
the struggles of living in poverty.

In
SPENT, participants took on the role of an unemployed single parent
with $1000 in their bank account. Participants begin the game by
choosing a job to apply for. Next they select a place to live. The
rest of the game consists of the participants making day-to-day
financial decisions and seeing the consequences of those actions.
For example, participants may encounter a scenario in which their
car breaks down and they need to decide whether to pay for it to be
fixed or to just start using the bus instead. After they make a
decision, they are shown the consequences of that decision. In this
scenario, they may be presented with a text box indicating that
taking bus to save money makes them late for work too often, and as
a consequence they are fired from their job for frequent tardiness.
However, if participants instead decided to pay for the damages, the
text box might say that they no longer have money to pay their rent
and are subsequently evicted.

The
objective of the game is to make to the end of 30 days without
running out of money and hopefully with enough money to pay next
month’s rent (~$1,000). We note that in many of these
scenarios the decision that leads to more money in reserve (e.g.,
foregoing a needed root canal) is not necessarily the best decision
when other factors (e.g., physical or mental health) are considered.
In this way, SPENT poignantly depicts the many challenges that
people in poverty face. Participants were instructed to play until
they either ran out of money or reached the end of the month.

In
the present research, the game took 11 minutes, on average, to
complete. While participants played the game they answered a number
of comprehension check questions to ensure that they were paying
attention. Questions included multiple choice questions such as,
“Which job requires admin experience?” and open-ended
questions such as, “Describe one of the situations encountered
during the game.” Forty-five percent of participants who
played the game made it to the end of the month, but no participants
succeeded in saving enough money to pay the next month’s rent.

In
the observation condition, participants watched one of four videos.
Each of these videos was a screen recording of one of four
confederates (one man) between the ages of 21 and 35 playing SPENT.
While watching the screen recordings, participants answered the
comprehension check questions used in the game-playing condition.
Participants did not receive any special instructions regarding how
they should view the video. Forty-one percent of participants viewed
a video in which the player made it to the end of the month; this
percentage did not significantly differ from the percentage of
participants in the game condition who made it to the end of the
month.

Measures.
Before playing the game or watching the video, participants
responded to a number of demographics items including gender (male
vs. female), age, race (White, African American, Asian/Pacific
Islander, Native American, Hispanic), and annual income.
Conservatism was measured by having participants indicate their
political ideology on a scale 1 = very
liberal
to 7 = very
conservative.

After
watching the video or playing the game, to first assess their
emotional responses, participants rated how much (from 1 = not
at all
to 5 = very
much)
of various emotions they were currently experiencing. Eight of these
items (warm, softhearted, moved, tender, concerned, touched,
compassionate, and sympathetic) represented empathic concern, which
has predicted positive intergroup attitudes in previous research
(Batson et al., 1997). Ten other items (frustrated, alert, scared,
upset, happy, hopeless, irritable, attentive, interested, and alert)
were included to obscure the purpose of the study. Factor analyses
on the eighteen items indicated three components. All of the
empathic concern items factored onto one component (eigenvalue =
5.39), with factor loadings ranging from .60 to .87. Responses to
the eight empathic concern items were averaged to for an Empathic
Concern measure (α = .93, M
= 2.89, SD
= 1.05).

Next,
participants in the game-playing and observation conditions
responded to three items measuring perceived personal agency in the
game; these items served as a manipulation check of condition
assignment. Participants responded using a scale from 1 = strongly
disagree
to 6 = strongly
agree
to the following items: “I felt I had control over the
outcomes in the scenarios presented”; “The outcomes in
the scenarios presented were a direct result of my personal
choices”; and “I felt I could not control the outcomes
in the scenarios presented.” Responses were reverse-coded as
needed and averaged to create a Perceived Personal Agency variable
(α = .79, M
= 3.08, SD
= 1.11).

The
main dependent
measures
in this study were belief in the controllability of poverty, support
for government-funded poverty-alleviating programing, and attitudes
toward the poor. The scale assessing beliefs about poverty contained
10 items measuring the extent to which people believe that poverty
is controllable and that poor people should be blamed for their
plight. Items included, “Poor people cannot fully control what
happens to them” (reverse-scored), and “Poor people are
personally to blame for their situation.” Participants
indicated their agreement on a scale of 1 = strongly
disagree
to 6 = strongly
agree,
and items were scored such that higher scores indicated a stronger
belief that poverty is controllable. Responses to these items were
averaged to create a Poverty Controllability Beliefs measure (α
= .90, M
= 3.05, SD
= 0.86).

A
scale measuring support for government-funded policies to reduce
poverty instructed participants to indicate how much they might
support four hypothetical policies using a scale from 1 = strongly
oppose
to 6 = strongly
support.
Items included, “Establishing more soup kitchens, this would
be funded by a 0.3% increase in income tax” and “Increasing
the minimum wage to $10.00/hour nation-wide.” We came up with
these items after conducting a web search for anti-poverty policies
being put in place at the local, state, or federal government level.
We added the “this would be funded by...” to items as
needed in order to clarify how the policies would be enacted. The
four items were averaged to create a Policy Support variable (α
= .82, M
= 4.40, SD
= 1.24).

Feeling
thermometers, which have been shown to be both reliable and valid
measures of social attitudes (Alwin, 1997; Kinder & Drake,
2009), assessed participants’ attitudes toward ten different
groups: Asian people, Black people, clowns, journalists, drug
addicts, factory workers, lawyers, poor people, homeless people, and
fast food workers. The groups were presented in random order.
Participants indicated how warmly they felt toward each of these
groups on a scale of 1 = very
cold
to 50 = very
warm
using a slider that was centered at 25. Poor people, homeless
people, and fast food workers were included to represent groups in
or near poverty; the other seven groups were included to obscure the
purpose of the study. Factor analysis confirmed that ratings for
poor, homeless, and fast food workers all loaded onto the same
factor (eigenvalue = 3.93), with loadings of .84, .72, and .79,
respectively. The thermometer ratings for poor, homeless, and fast
food workers were combined and averaged to create an Attitudes
toward the Poor variable (α = .87, M
= 34.03, SD
= 9.58).

Procedure.
Participants
completed all measures online using the survey tool Qualtrics. The
experiment took 24 minutes on average and participants received
$1.01 as compensation. First, participants completed the demographic
items described above. Next, participants were randomly assigned to
one of three conditions. In the control condition, participants are
instructed to play Stop Disasters. In the game-playing condition,
participants were instructed to play SPENT. In the observation
condition, participants were randomly assigned to watch one of four
screen recordings of someone playing SPENT. After exposure to either
SPENT or Stop Disasters, participants responded to items measuring
their emotions, including emotions related to empathic concern.
Additionally, participants in the observation and game conditions
responded to items measuring their feelings of perceived personal
agency while playing or observing SPENT. Finally, participants in
all conditions completed the three scales measuring the main
dependent variables: belief that poverty is personally controllable,
attitudes toward the poor, and support for government-funded
anti-poverty policies.

Results

All
continuous variables were centered at zero. To examine the effects
of condition, we used the standard method for analyzing categorical
variables with three levels (Chen, Ender, Mitchell, & Wells,
2003) to create two dummy variables: Game vs. Control (in which Game
= 1, Control = 0, and Observation = 0) and Observation vs. Control
(in which Observation = 1, Game = 0, and Control = 0). Before
investigating the effects of condition, we first examined the
demographics variables (age, race, gender, etc.)1.
We found that conservatism, age, gender, and income significantly
predicted one or more dependent measures. Therefore, the following
variables were included as covariates in all analyses: gender (male
vs. female), age, conservatism, and income. For a summary of
observed and covariate-adjusted means broken down by condition for
participants’ perceived personal agency, empathic concern,
controllability beliefs, attitudes toward the poor, and policy
support, see Table 1. See Table 2 for a matrix of the correlations
between controllability beliefs, empathic concern, attitudes toward
the poor, and policy support in each condition and collapsing across
condition.

Table
2. Study
1 Partial Correlations (Controlling for the Effects of:
Conservatism, Age, Income, andGender) and Zero-Order
Correlations between Poverty Controllability Beliefs, Empathic
Concern, Attitudestoward the Poor, and Support of Government
Policy in Each Condition and Across Condition.

Condition

Measure

Policy
Support

Attitudes

to.
Poor

Empathic

Concern

Observation

Controllability
Beliefs

-.58**
(-.72**)

-.36*
(-.49**)

-.27†
(-.31**)

Empathic
Concern

.35*
(.56**)

.48**
(.54**)

Attitudes
to. Poor

.59**
(.68**)

Control

Controllability
Beliefs

-.39**
(-.56**)

-.08
(-.20†)

-.001
(-.03)

Empathic
Concern

.14
(.14)

.37**
(.39**)

Attitudes
to. Poor

.31**
(.40**)

Game

Controllability
Beliefs

-.21†
(-.35**)

-.16
(-.17)

-.35**
(-.37**)

Empathic
Concern

.46**
(.51**)

.26*
(.33**)

Attitudes
to. Poor

.42**
(.45**)

Overall

Controllability
Beliefs

-.38**
(-.51**)

-.21**
(-.27**)

-.23**
(-.25**)

Empathic
Concern

.36**
(.37**)

.39**
(.42**)

Attitudes
to. Poor

.44**
(.49**)

Note:
**p< .01, *p< .05, †p< .10.

Effects
of game outcome. We
conducted supplementary analyses testing whether, among participants
who played SPENT in the study, there were differences in effects as
a function of whether the player “won” the game. As
indicated previously, 45% of participants who played SPENT “won”
the game (made it to the end of 30 days with money still in their
bank account). To examine the effect of performance on the game, we
created a dichotomous variable indicating whether or not a
participant made it to the end of 30 days. Making it to the end of
30 days was associated with marginally more support of government
policies to reduce poverty, r(67)
= .22, p
= .084, and marginally more empathic concern, r(67)
= .21, p
= .081. There were no other effects. In the observation condition
(in which 62% of participants watched a screen recording of a player
who made it to the end of 30 days), game outcome was unrelated to
empathic concern, policy support, liking, or controllability
beliefs.

Empathic
concern. Participants
in both the observation condition (b
= 1.01, SE
= .18, β = .401, p<.001,
95% CI[.65, 1.36]) and the game condition (b
= .49, SE
= .16, β = .225, p
= .002, 95% CI[.18, .80]) felt more empathic concern after the
condition manipulation when compared to participants in the control
condition. These results are in line with our prediction that both
observing and playing SPENT would promote greater feelings of
empathic concern feelings than participating in the control
condition. However, an additional comparison revealed that the
observation condition tended to elicit more empathic concern than
did the game condition, b
= .19, SE
= .10, β = .134, p
= .057.

Poverty
controllability beliefs. When
the covariates and two condition dummy variables are used to predict
the belief that poverty is personally controllable, participants in
the observation condition showed less belief that poverty is
controllable when compared to participants in the control condition,
b
= -.35, SE
= .15, β = -.171, p
= .018, 95% CI[-.64, -.06]. Participants in the SPENT condition did
not differ significantly from those in the control condition, b
= -.20, SE
= .13, β = -.110, p
= .127, 95% CI[-.45, .06]. This result is inconsistent with our
predictions: Playing SPENT did not increase controllability beliefs
as we expected (see Table 1).

Attitudes
toward the poor. In
the model predicting attitudes toward the poor using the
aforementioned covariates and the two condition dummy variables,
participants in the observation condition showed more favorable
attitudes toward the poor than did participants in the control
condition, b
= 4.03, SE
= 1.69, β = .177, p
= .018, 95% CI[.69, 7.37]. Participants in the SPENT game condition
did not differ in their attitudes toward the poor compared to those
in the control condition, b
= 1.94, SE
= 1.48, β = .098, p
= .191, 95% CI[-.97, 4.85]. Overall, the findings for attitudes
toward the poor are consistent with our hypotheses.

Policy
support. Using
the same model as before to predict support of government funded
anti-poverty policies, the observation condition again produced more
policy support than the control condition (b
= .55, SE
= .19, β = .184, p
= .004, 95% CI[.18, .91]), while the effect of game condition was
non-significant, b
= .26, SE
= .16, β = .101, p
= .110, 95% CI[-.06, .58]. As with attitudes toward the poor, these
findings are consistent with our hypotheses.

Examining
the intergroup effects of condition. To
more directly examine the intergroup
effects of playing or observing SPENT (that is, the effect SPENT has
on participants who are not poor themselves compared to its effect
on poor participants), we classified participants as poor or not
poor using the poverty cut-off value identified in the most recent
US Census statistics on average household income (United States
Census Bureau, 2014, 2015). We then analyzed the influence of
poverty status, condition (as in the previous analyses, analyzing
the effects of the three conditions with two dummy-coded variables
representing Game vs. Control and Observation vs. Control
comparisons), and all interactions between poverty status and
condition on the four main dependent measures. The effect of
condition was not moderated by poverty status, with one notable
exception. Analyses revealed a game (playing SPENT vs. playing the
Control game) x poverty status interaction on attitudes toward the
poor (b
= 6.25, SE
= 3.30, β = .200, p
= .060, 95% CI[-.26, 12.75]).

To
further investigate this interaction, we examined the effect of
playing SPENT on attitudes toward the poor separately for
participants with incomes below and above the poverty line. Among
participants classified as poor based on their income, playing SPENT
led to significantly more positive attitudes toward the poor, b
= 7.04, SE
= 2.5, β = .395, p
= .007, 95% CI[1.98, 12.11]). Non-poor participants’ attitudes
were not influenced by playing SPENT (b
= . 12, SE
= 1.82, β = .006, p
= .946, 95% CI[-3.48, 3.72]). All other analyses listed in the
results section were conducted using the full sample, collapsed
across poverty status, with supplementary analyses conducted
separately for non-poor participants.

Next
we tested this model among all participants but only within the game
condition. Note that playing SPENT led to more empathic concern, b
= .49, SE
= .16, β = .225, p
= .002, but did not influence controllability beliefs, b
= -.20, SE
= .13, β = -.110, p
= .127. Using the same bootstrapping macro as before, the indirect
effect of game condition on positive attitudes toward the poor
through empathic concern was significant, b
= 1.57, SE
= .61, 95% CI[.58, 3.02]. Controllability beliefs did not account
for this indirect effect, b
= .28, SE
= .30, 95% CI[-.04, 1.21]. Thus, our hypothesis was partially
supported: Empathic concern significantly accounted for the indirect
effect of condition on positive attitudes toward the poor in both
game and observation conditions, whereas controllability beliefs
only accounted for the indirect effect of observation condition.

In
this case, our hypothesis was fully supported when examining the
influence of observing SPENT. Observing SPENT led to more policy
support in part because it also led to increased empathic concern
and decreased belief in the controllability of poverty. Our
hypothesis was only partially supported when examining the Game
condition. Here, only empathic concern accounted for the indirect
effect of condition on policy support.

Discussion

In
Study 1, we examined the influence of playing a poverty simulation
game, observing a poverty simulation game, and playing a control
game on attitudes and beliefs about the poor. We hypothesized that
playing the game would lead to both more empathic concern and more
belief that poverty is personally controllable relative to playing a
game unrelated to poverty. Playing SPENT produce greater empathic
concern but did not lead to more belief in the controllability of
poverty. Overall, compared to playing the control (disaster) game,
playing SPENT did not influence attitudes toward the poor or support
for policies benefitting the poor.

We
further hypothesized that observing the game would positively
influence attitudes toward the poor. Indeed, we found that
observation evoked empathic concern, increased positive attitudes
toward the poor, led to more support of government funded
anti-poverty policies, and decreased the belief that poverty is
personally controllable. Lastly, we predicted that empathic concern
and controllability beliefs would significantly account for the
indirect effects of condition on both attitudes toward the poor and
policy support. This hypothesis was partially supported. While both
greater empathic concern and weaker controllability beliefs
accounted for the indirect effect of observation condition on policy
support, only empathic concern accounted for the indirect effect of
observation condition on attitudes toward the poor.

Overall,
these data show that observing the adversity of members of a
stigmatized group has a variety of positive effects on intergroup
attitudes and beliefs. Our findings support past work indicating
that observation of adversity can evoke empathic concern and other
positive emotions (Shih et al., 2009). Furthermore, our data do not
support the prejudice-reducing claims put forth by the creators of
SPENT (Urban Ministries of Durham, 2011). In our study, playing
SPENT had no positive effect on attitudes toward the poor.

Our
prediction that playing SPENT would lead to higher controllability
beliefs was not supported. In fact, playing SPENT had no main effect
on controllability beliefs. It’s possible that SPENT’s
effects on attitudes and beliefs are moderated by personal ideology,
such as belief in meritocracy. Past work shows that individuals high
in meritocracy beliefs more strongly believe that poverty is
personally controllable and thus hold especially negative attitudes
toward the poor (Kluegel & Smith, 1986). Although these results
generally support our hypotheses, other influences could be
involved. For example, it is possible that playing (vs. observing)
SPENT did not positively influence attitudes because game players
were more distracted, more self-focused, or more physically aroused
than game observers. However, further examination of emotions
relating to alertness (mean of how alert, attentive, and interested
participants felt after playing/observing the game; α = .90)
revealed no differences between the Observation, Game, and Control
conditions, F(2,
222) = .41, p
= .665, suggesting that these results cannot be readily explained by
differences in distraction or arousal levels.

Moreover,
the small percentage of participants in the game condition who
reached the end of game (45%) could have influenced SPENT’s
ability to positively impact attitudes toward the poor. While
playing SPENT in general had no significant effect on attitudes or
beliefs, players who played the game until the end (i.e., made
effective enough decisions to make it through the end of 30 days
with money still left in their bank account) tended to display more
empathy, more support of government programs to reduce poverty, and
less belief that poverty is personally controllable. Had a larger
percentage of participants “won” SPENT, the game
condition might have had a more positive effect on poverty beliefs
and attitudes.

Interestingly,
these effects of game outcome are counterintuitive when considered
in comparison with past work on perspective-taking (Shih et al.,
2009). If playing SPENT in the role of a poor person leads the
player to view his or her experiences as reflecting the experiences
of the poor, performing well on the game should lead players to
believe that poor people, like him or her, can lift themselves out
of poverty just by making the right choices. The player’s
controllability beliefs should be intensified, leading to less
liking of the poor (Rank et al., 2003). Instead, we found the
opposite effect-- doing well in the game was associated with more
positivity toward the poor. These results suggest that SPENT’S
ability to change attitudes and beliefs about the poor comes not
from its role-playing aspect, but from its educational aspect. The
more time that players spend learning about poverty in the game, the
more likely they are to feel positively toward the poor and to
support poverty reducing policies. However, it’s likely that
this effect wouldn’t be seen for players who begin the game
already holding strong beliefs about the personal controllability of
life success.

To
the extent that perceptions of perceived controllability is an
important factor in the effects of playing the computer game (SPENT)
on attitudes toward poor people, the effects of playing the game
would be expected to be more pronounced among people for whom
personal controllability is more central to their social values and
attitudes. We investigated this possibility in Study 2.

Study 2

Study
2 further investigated the influence of playing a computer game
about poverty (SPENT) on attitudes toward the poor by considering
individual differences in meritocracy beliefs as a moderator of the
game’s effects. Beyond replicating the relationships observed
in Study 1, we hypothesized that the effect of SPENT
on attitudes would be moderated by meritocracy beliefs. In
particular, to the extent that playing a game about poverty (SPENT),
compared to playing a game about recycling, makes personal
controllability of poverty salient (as we found in Study 1), playing
SPENT may have a less positive impact on attitudes toward the poor
among people for whom the personal controllability of poverty is not
typically salient – that is, for people lower in meritocracy.
Thus, we predicted that whereas people high in meritocracy would
tend to believe that poverty was personally controllable and thus
hold generally negative attitudes toward the poor (Cozzarelli et
al., 2001), among people low in meritocracy, playing the game about
poverty (SPENT) would lead them to believe that poverty is more
personally controllable, and thus lead to less positive attitudes
toward the poor.

Method

Participants.
Participants
were American undergraduate students over the age of 18, who
participated to fulfill a course option. The sample size was
determined by collecting data from as many students as possible in
one semester. A total of 54 students participated, but because there
was missing data for seven of them, the final sample size was 47. In
this final sample, 26 were men, and 21 were women. Seventy-nine
percent of the participants indicated a childhood socioeconomic
status (SES) of middle class or higher. Age information was not
collected but given that the sample was made up entirely of
undergraduates, it is likely that the participants were between the
ages of 18 and 22.

Experimental
conditions. Participants
played different online games
in the different experimental conditions. In this study, we used an
online game about recycling, Garbage Dreams, as the comparison game
in the control condition. In this game, participants took on the
role of the Zaballeen people in Cairo who are responsible for
disposing of Cairo’s garbage. The point of the game is to earn
money by recycling as much of the garbage as possible. Participants
can buy the ability to recycle different types of waste.
Participants were instructed to play for ten minutes. During the
game, participants responded to several attention-check questions.
For example, they were asked how much money they made from recycling
in their first month.

Garbage
Dreams is similar to SPENT in that it involves taking on the role of
a disadvantaged group member, making financial decisions, and seeing
the consequences of those decisions. We chose a game similar to
SPENT to ensure that the effects found in Study 1 were unique to
SPENT and could not be elicited by playing just any immersive online
game involving financial decisions and a disadvantaged group of
people. Garbage Dreams differs from SPENT in a way that makes it a
meaningful comparison game: the goal of Garbage Dreams is not to
make users understand the struggles of the impoverished Zaballeen
people. Instead, the emphasis is on understanding the job of the
Zaballeen. The game does not mention the struggles faced by the
Zaballeen or the short or long-term effects of the financial
decisions made by players. By contrast, SPENT’s emphasis is on
understanding the life of the poor. SPENT focuses on the challenges
faced by the poor and the outcomes of their financial decisions.
SPENT is meant to increase empathy for the poor, and so uses
language, graphics, and music to achieve that goal. Garbage Dreams
is merely a game about recycling. Thus, we concluded that Garbage
Dreams would act as a better control than the game used in Study 1
(Stop Disasters).

In
the experimental condition, participants played SPENT. Participants
spent an average of 11 minutes playing SPENT.
While they were playing the game, participants responded to several
attention-check questions such as “Which job did you choose”;
“How much was your rent?” and “Did you make it to
the end of the month? If so, how much was in your bank account at
the end?” Eighty percent of participants made it to the end of
the month and one-third of those participants ended with $250 or
more in their bank account. No participants ended the game with
enough money to pay the next month’s rent. The amount of money
participants had at the end of the month (categorized as zero,
small, medium, or large) did not significantly influence poverty
controllability beliefs, F(3,
22) = 1.53, p
= .234, ηp2
= .173, or attitudes toward the poor, F(3,
22) = 1.21, p
= .330, ηp2
= .141. Note that in this study there was no observation condition.

Measures.
Before playing either Garbage Dreams or SPENT, participants
completed Lalonde, Doan, and Patterson’s (2000) Meritocracy
Beliefs Scale. In this scale, participants rated their agreement
with seven statements on a range of 1 = strongly
agree
to 5 = strongly
disagree.
Sample items are, “Many people from minority groups do not
reach positions of importance because they are not ambitious
enough,” and “Our present social system works to the
disadvantage of people from visible minorities” (reverse
scored). An overall meritocracy score was created by averaging
participant responses on each of the items, reverse-coding
negatively worded items (M
= 2.50, SD
= .51). Past studies using this meritocracy scale found a Cronbach
alpha close to .71 (Foster, Sloto, & Ruby, 2006)3.
In this study the Cronbach alpha was .57.

After
playing either SPENT or Garbage Dreams, participants first indicated
the degree to which they felt the empathic concern emotions moved,
warm, softhearted, tender, compassionate, sympathetic, concerned,
and touched from Batson et al.’s (1997) Empathic Concern scale
(α = .90, M
= 2.88, SD
= 0.84), the same scale used in Study 1. Next, participants
completed the main dependent measures in this study, attitudes
toward the poor and beliefs about the poor. The attitude measure was
the same feeling thermometer used in Study 1, except that
participants indicated warmth ratings on a scale from 1 = very
cold
to 11 = very
warm
instead of a scale from 1 to 50 and there were fewer additional
groups (lawyers, clowns, drug addicts, journalists, and Black
people). Factor analysis revealed three components. The warmth
ratings for poor people, homeless people, and fast food workers all
loaded onto component one (eigenvalue = 2.86) with factor loadings
of .90, .88, and .68. An Attitudes toward the Poor variable was
created by averaging the warmth ratings for these three groups (α
= .82, M
= 6.30, SD
= 1.57).

The
beliefs measure was Stevenson and Medler’s (1995) Economic
Beliefs scale, which was designed to measure classist beliefs.
Participants indicated their agreement with items such as, “People
who stay on welfare have no desire to work” and “Homeless
people should get their acts together and become productive members
of society” using a scale from 1 = strongly
disagree
to 5 = strongly
agree.
Factor analysis indicated a subscale accounting for 24.9% of the
variance and containing four items that correlated .50 or more.
These items mainly reflected the view that the poor’s
defective choices were to blame for their poverty (e.g., “Most
poor people are lazy”). These four “personal blame”
items were averaged to create a Controllability Beliefs variable (α
= .77, M
= 1.93, SD
= 0.74). We used a different (and previously validated) measure of
controllability beliefs in Study 2 to examine the convergent
validity of the measure we created for Study 1.

Finally,
a modified version of Green and Brock’s (2000) Narrative
Engagement scale was used to confirm that the two games were equally
engaging and interactive. Participants rated their agreement with
such statements as “During the game, my body was in room, but
my mind was inside the world created by the game” using a
scale from 1 = strongly
disagree
to 5 = strongly
agree. The
five items were averaged to create an overall engagement score (α
= .73, M
= 3.37, SD
= .75).

Procedure.
Participants,
who signed up for a study described as “Online Social Decision
Making” were contacted electronically to complete, embedded in
other items purportedly assessing participant opinions, a measure of
meritocracy beliefs. At least one week later, participants came into
the lab to complete the second half of the study. They were told the
first thing they had to do was play a game on the computer.
Participants were randomly assigned to play one of two online games:
SPENT or Garbage Dreams. After playing one of the two games,
participants completed an empathy measure as well as measures of
their attitudes and beliefs towards poor people. Lastly,
participants completed a measure assessing their engagement with the
game they played.

Results

In
all analyses, continuous variables were centered at zero. In
investigating interactions, “high” and “low”
levels of a continuous variable refer to one standard deviation
above and below the mean. To measure the effect of game, we used a
dummy code (SPENT vs. Garbage Dreams). Demographic variables (gender
and childhood SES) did not influence any of the dependent measures
so they were not included in subsequent analyses. When the one
participant who indicated his or her childhood SES as “poor”
is excluded from the analyses, the results are the same. See Table 3
for a list of zero-order correlations among the variables Attitudes
toward the Poor, Controllability Beliefs, Empathic Concern, and
Meritocracy Beliefs across and between the two conditions.

Effects
of game outcome.
Eighty percent of participants in the SPENT condition made it to the
end of 30 days. This lack of variation in game outcome makes it
difficult to ascertain how game performance influenced attitudes and
beliefs. Game outcome, measured using a dichotomous variable (made
it to the end of 30 days vs. ended before 30 days), did not predict
any dependent measures.

In
the Garbage Dreams condition, meritocracy has a significant effect
on controllability beliefs such that those lower in meritocracy
showed lower controllability beliefs, b
= 1.21, SE
= .23, β = .757, p<
.001. By contrast, among people who played SPENT, there was no
significant relationship between meritocracy and controllability
beliefs, b
= .26, SE
= .26, β = .212, p
= .321. Examining the data by low versus high meritocracy, when
people low in meritocracy played SPENT, they indicated more belief
that poverty is personally controllable when compared to low
meritocracy people who played Garbage Dreams, b
= .62, SE
= .25, β = .432, p
= .016. People high in meritocracy showed no effect of game
condition on their controllability beliefs, b
= -.33, SE
= .24, β = -.240, p
= .177.

Attitudes
toward the poor.
We predicted that playing SPENT might lead to more negative
attitudes towards the poor due to its emphasis on agency and that
this relationship would be moderated by meritocracy. Although
analyses indicated no significant direct effect of the game or
meritocracy on attitudes toward the poor, there was a significant
interaction between meritocracy and game, b
= 1.97, SE
= .80, β = .496, p
= .018, 95% CI[.35, 3.59], see Figure 3.

Simple
slopes analysis revealed that, in the Garbage Dreams (control)
condition, meritocracy had a significant effect on attitudes: Those
higher in meritocracy showed less positive attitudes toward the
poor, b
= -1.29, SE
= .52, β = -.477, p
= .021. In the SPENT condition, meritocracy had no effect on
attitudes, b
= .68, SE
= .61, β = .232, p
= .276. Breaking down the analysis by low and high meritocracy, we
see that playing SPENT led low meritocracy participants to have less
positive attitudes towards the poor when compared to Garbage Dreams,
b
= 1.48, SE
= .57, β = .516, p
= .013. By contrast, the attitudes of participants high in
meritocracy were not affected by game condition, b
= -.526, SE
= .58, β = -.183, p
= .366. Thus, playing SPENT (when compared to playing Garbage
Dreams) led low meritocracy individuals to show more negative
attitudes toward the poor. These results are in line with our
prediction that if playing SPENT led to more negative affect, this
would be most prominent for those low in meritocracy3.

Mediated
moderation. Preacher
and Hayes’ (2008) bootstrapping macro (model 8) using 5,000
bootstraps was utilized to test whether or not the effect of the
game by meritocracy interaction on attitudes toward the poor is in
fact explained (mediated) by the effect of the game by meritocracy
interaction on controllability beliefs. In this model, game
condition was the independent variable, controllability beliefs was
the mediator, attitudes toward the poor was the dependent variable,
and meritocracy as the moderator for both the relationship between
game condition and attitudes toward the poor and the relationship
between game condition and controllability beliefs. When
controllability belief is included as an independent variable in the
model where game, meritocracy, and the game by meritocracy
interaction are used to predict attitudes toward the poor, the
interaction between game and meritocracy becomes non-significant, b
= 1.32, SE
= .84, p
= .124. Thus, among people low in meritocracy, playing SPENT lead to
less favorable attitudes toward the poor because it lead people to
believe that poverty is personally controllable, 95% CI[0.12, 2.01],
see Figure 4.

Mediation.
We
further investigated the effect of the game by meritocracy
interaction on attitudes through controllability beliefs by
examining only participants in the Garbage Dreams condition, in
which we found significant effects of meritocracy on both attitudes
and controllability beliefs. Following the steps for mediation
(Baron & Kenny, 1986), linear regression showed that meritocracy
predicted both attitudes toward the poor (b
= -1.29, SE
= .52, p
= .021) and controllability beliefs, b
= -1.21, SE
= .23, p<
.001. In a model containing controllability beliefs and meritocracy,
controllability beliefs predicted attitudes toward the poor (b
= -1.11, SE
= .45, p
= .021) while the effect of meritocracy was non-significant, b
= -.05, SE
= .71, p
= .943.

Figure
4.
Study 2 Flowchart Depicting How Meritocracy Beliefs Moderate the
Relationship between Playing SPENT and both Controllability Beliefs
about Poverty and Attitudes toward the Poor and How Controllability
Beliefs Mediate the Relationship between Playing SPENT and Attitudes
toward the Poor. **p< .01, *p< .05, †p< .10

Preacher
and Hayes’s (2008) bootstrapping macro (model 4) utilizing
5,000 bootstraps was used to test whether controllability beliefs
mediated the relationship between meritocracy and attitudes toward
the poor in the Garbage Dreams condition, with meritocracy as the
independent variable and controllability beliefs as a mediator.
Indeed, controllability beliefs were a significant mediator, 95%
CI[0.36, 2.77]. When no other variables were affecting individuals’
attitudes towards the poor, low meritocracy individuals showed more
positive attitudes toward the poor because they believed poverty is
less personally controllable

Discussion

Study
2 was designed to conceptually replicate and theoretically extend
the findings from Study 1. In terms of conceptual replication, Study
2 tested the effect of playing an interactive poverty game versus
another type of control condition, playing an interactive recycling
game, on attitudes toward the poor. With respect to extending Study
1, Study 2 also examined meritocracy as a moderating variable and
controllability beliefs as a mediating variable.

As
in Study 1, compared to playing a computer game unrelated to poverty
(Stop Disasters in Study 1, Garbage Dreams in Study 2), playing
SPENT did not significantly affect attitudes toward the poor.
However, as predicted, individual differences in meritocracy
moderated the impact of playing the different computer games.
Specifically, participants high in meritocracy were not
significantly affected by SPENT; they had consistently relatively
negative attitudes toward the poor. In contrast, playing SPENT
compared to Garbage Dreams did affect participants low in
meritocracy. In the control (Garbage Dreams) condition, participants
low in meritocracy had relatively positive attitudes toward the
poor, but after playing SPENT, their attitudes toward the poor were
more negative. Moreover, controllability beliefs mediated the
relationship between game playing and attitudes toward the poor
among participants low in meritocracy. That is, the more negative
attitudes toward the poor after playing SPENT versus Garbage Dreams
occurred because playing SPENT produced stronger controllability of
poverty beliefs among low meritocracy participants.

One
finding from Study 1 that was not replicated in Study 2 was the
effect for playing SPENT on empathic concern. However,
methodological factors – responses to the game used in the
control condition – may account for this seeming discrepancy.
Inspection of the data reveals that participants who played SPENT in
Study 1 (M
= 2.98,
SD
= .98) had very similar levels of empathic concern compared to those
who played SPENT in Study 2 (M
= 2.91,
SD
= .77). The responses to the control conditions differed: Those who
played Stop Disasters in Study 1 showed less empathic concern (M
= 2.49,
SD
= 1.00) than those who played Garbage Dreams in Study 2 (M
= 2.85,
SD
= .91). We note that we assessed empathic concern by asking
participants about the emotions they were experiencing at the given
moment, not specifically toward people in poverty.

Thus,
it appears that the experience of playing the game about recycling
while learning about a disadvantaged group of people in Egypt
(Garbage Dream) in Study 2 was a stronger empathy-eliciting exercise
than the game about limiting damage from natural disasters (Stop
Disasters), which had a stronger focus on building structures, a
weaker emphasis on the well-being of the people in the town, and was
in generally less emotionally immersive. Of course, because this is
a post-hoc explanation for the results on empathic concern, we
cannot test its veracity. It is very possible that there exists a
different explanation for why our two control games elicited
different levels of empathic concern.

Another
way Study 2 differed from Study 1 was the percentage of participants
who “won” the game (that is, made it to the end of 30
days); 45% of Study 1 participants won the game whereas 80% of Study
2 participants won the game. This discrepancy cannot be explained by
a difference in difficulty level or instructions. However, the
participant populations in these two studies differed in likely
relevant ways. Study 1 employed a Mechanical Turk sample; Study 2
involved participants who were undergraduates at an Ivy League
university. Differences in analytic aptitude, on average, and
incentive could both contribute to the higher success rate of
participants in Study 2 than Study 1. Participants in Study 2
scored, on average in the top 5% in standardized test scores of
applicants for college admission (College Board, n.d.; Yale
University, 2016).

In
terms of effort incentive, participants in Study 2 were paid $1.01
for being in the study. Participants in Study 2 chose to participate
in research as one way of fulfilling a course research expectation,
which was directly relevant to their elective course (Introductory
Psychology). Moreover, despite the better performance in the game by
participants in Study 2 than Study 1, as we noted earlier, (a)
whether participants won the game did not have a strong or
consistently significant effect on response to people in poverty,
and (b) despite these between-study differences in game performance,
the pattern of results in both studies are similar conceptually.

One
limitation of Study 2 was that the sample size was relatively small,
restricted by the availability of participants in the
college-student pool at the time. Despite the limited statistical
power associated with a small sample we were able to detect a
significant interaction between the meritocracy and game for
attitudes toward the poor, the outcome of primary interest, that
reflected a moderate effect size (β = .496). Nevertheless,
confidence in the stability of the effects we observed would be
enhanced by replication with a larger sample.

Another
limitation was that the meritocracy beliefs scale used in Study 2,
although validated in previous research (Lalonde et al., 2000), had
a relatively low Cronbach’s alpha and, overall, had a fairly
strong association statistically (r
= .51; see Table 3) and perhaps conceptually (e.g., items such as
“Many people from minority groups do not reach positions of
importance because they are not ambitious enough”) with
controllability beliefs. Thus, while the relationship between
meritocracy beliefs and beliefs about the controllability of
poverty, which would be expected because of the importance of
effort, investment, and motivation in meritocratic ideology, does
not compromise the interpretation of the moderating effect of
meritocracy beliefs on the type of game played, the additional
mediation effect of perceived controllability of poverty on
attitudes toward the poor should be interpreted with some caution.

General Discussion

Our
two studies examined how playing a highly popular online game about
poverty (Flandez, 2011) might influence attitudes and beliefs about
the poor in order to understand whether active media forms (games)
differentially influence social attitudes when compared to passive
media forms (videos) and how these differences might come about. We
found that because playing a game about poverty (and thus having
control over one’s outcomes) led participants to believe that
poverty is personally controllable, it did not positively influence
attitudes toward the poor. The null main effect of SPENT occurred in
both an online adult population (Study 1) and an in-lab
undergraduate population (Study 2). Furthermore, personal ideology
influenced the effectiveness of playing an agency-promoting poverty
game. People low in meritocratic beliefs were more strongly and more
negatively influenced by the game.

Future
research might consider both methodological and conceptual issues
relating to the effects of online games on social attitudes.
Methodologically, we compared the effects to playing the game about
poverty to two different games: one, in Study 1, about preparing for
a disaster and the other, in Study 2, about recycling. The
conceptual convergence of our findings across studies and the tests
of moderating and mediating effects are consistent with our
hypotheses and demonstrate support with strong ecological validity
(i.e., with actual, popular online games). However, these games
represent complex activities, and each game can have a range of
different effects. To provide more methodological refinement, future
researchers might develop an online game with the same basic
structure but for which the elements of the task (e.g., about
managing finances or making decisions in some other area, such as
environmental conservation) can be specifically varied while holding
other aspects of situation constant. Researchers could also examine
games that are more about education and awareness than
perspective-taking and empathy per se. Kampf (2015) was able to
change the intergroup attitudes of Israeli Jews and Palestinian by
having them play an educational awareness-raising game about the
Israel-Palestine conflict.

Conceptually,
future research might consider how online games and their elements
(e.g., emphasis on controllability) affects responses to other
social groups. Playing SPENT imbues the player with a sense of
personal agency; the player extends this feeling to the impoverished
character in the game and subsequently believes that people in
poverty also have personal agency over their outcomes, which
adversely affects attitudes toward poor people. This negative impact
on attitudes may not occur for other social groups. Controllability
beliefs form the basis of poverty-based prejudice (Gorski, 2011). By
contrast, if the game had focused on a stigma that is not seen as
personally controllable (such as physical disabilities), the
negative effects of playing an online game on attitudes toward the
group would likely be much more limited. Thus, future research might
examine whether playing (vs. observing) games that emphasize player
choice and autonomy would have greater negative impact on groups
perceived to have more controllable stigmas (e.g., alcoholics,
overweight people) than uncontrollable stigmas (e.g., victims of
child abuse). Moreover, future research can examine how the context
in which games are played influences intergroup attitudes. Recent
work by Adachi and colleagues (2014) indicates that playing a
multiplayer shooter game with an outgroup member greatly improves
attitudes toward that outgroup.

It
is important to continue to study the intergroup effects of computer
and video gaming as these studies showed that active forms of media
are uniquely different from more passive forms of media in certain
ways, and these differences lead to diverse effects on intergroup
attitudes and beliefs. Currently, psychologists know a great deal
about how passive media (that is, television, films, radio, and
books) influences social beliefs and which mechanisms cause these
changes to take place (Mutz & Goldman, 2010). Less is known
about how computer games influence social beliefs, although research
in this area is currently on the rise (Greitemeyer & Osswald,
2010; Kampf & Cuhadar, 2015). Considering the growing popularity
of free online games with the goal of changing social beliefs and
attitudes (Games for Change, 2015; H2 Gambling Capital, 2015) and
the emerging evidence that gaming’s focus on personal agency
could potentially cause game-based prejudice interventions to
backfire, it is important to further understand how games influence
attitudes.

While
the current paper focused on games’ emphasis on personal
agency, it is likely that other aspects (e.g., focus on wining vs.
losing, degree of difficulty of the game) also affect games’
effectiveness as prejudice interventions. Kaufman and Flanagan
(2015) in particular outline several novel strategies using their
embedded design approach, Moreover, feelings of personal agency may
not affect attitude change in all situations. The current paper
examined poor people as the stigmatized group and specifically
controllability beliefs about poverty, as controllability of a
condition is a critical dimension determining the nature of group
stigmatization (Jones et al., 1984). Past work has established that
people tend to believe that poverty is personally controllable and
that this belief fuels negative attitudes toward the poor (Soss &
Schram, 2007). That is, assumptions about the personal agency of
poor people is a known antecedent of anti-poor attitudes. For groups
with stigmas that are not seen as personally controllable (e.g., gay
people), beliefs about personal agency should not influence
attitudes and a game involving personal agency might be able to
increase positive attitudes toward that group by evoking empathic
concern.

For
addressing stigmas that are seen as personally controllable, future
work could investigate ways that games could promote empathy while
not increasing controllability beliefs. For example, a game in which
players experienced the negative situations associated with poverty
without being able to control those situations might be able to
decrease prejudice because it lacks the agency component. Past work
indicates that observing out-group adversity through the perspective
of the stigmatized group can promote empathy and liking for that
outgroup (Shih et al., 2009). Additionally, a game which explained
to players how aspects of a certain stigma actually are personally
uncontrollable could lead to more positive attitudes toward people
with that stigma. Prejudice interventions in which participants are
shown the genetic influences on weight have had some success at
decreasing bias toward the overweight (Hague & White, 2005).

Continued
work on the intergroup influences of computer games is important not
only to increase understanding of how active media differs from
passive media but also to aid in the creation of games which can
positively influence intergroup attitudes and beliefs. As mentioned
previously, games with the goal of increasing empathy and reducing
bias toward out-groups are already being created and played by
individuals all over the world (Games for Change, 2015). As of 2011,
SPENT had been played by over one million people (Urban Ministries
of Durham, 2011). More importantly, these games are potentially
being played by individuals who have great power to influence the
lives of disadvantaged group members. The creators of SPENT
currently have a petition underway asking members of the U.S.
Congress to play SPENT (Urban Ministries of Durham, 2011). Further,
many of games hosted on Gamesforchange.org are described as being
designed to be played by policymakers in order to influence their
policy decisions (Huey, 2013).

This
is problematic because the current paper suggests that interactive
games have the potential to actually increase prejudice toward
certain groups. Thus, if policymakers and members of Congress are
encouraged to play one of these games that, due to some aspect of
its design (e.g., focus on agency), promotes negative attitudes, it
is possible that these games could lead to the passage of state or
federal laws and policies that perpetuate or increase the
inequalities faced by members of stigmatized groups.

The
current paper offers novel insight into how the content of a
perspective-taking online game influences intergroup attitudes and
beliefs. Further work on gaming’s intergroup effects will
contribute to psychologists’ understanding of how active and
passive media forms diversely influence attitudes and will inform
the creation of games that can reduce prejudiced attitudes and
behavior.

Notes

1. Participants who
watched video 1 in the observation condition were removed from all
analyses because video 1 was considerably shorter than the other
videos and led to significantly less empathy, liking, and change in
controllability beliefs.2. Note that the degrees of freedom are
only 19 here because this measure was added to the study half-way
through data collection. 3. All results in Studies 1 and 2
remain significant if liking of groups besides the poor is included
as a predictor.

Batson,
C. D., & Ahmad, N. (2001). Empathy‐induced
altruism in a prisoner's dilemma II: what if the target of empathy
has defected. European
Journal of Social Psychology, 31,
25-36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.26

Cameron,
L., Rutland, A., Hossain, R., & Petley, R. (2011). When and why
does extended contact work? The role of high quality direct contact
and group norms in the development of positive ethnic intergroup
attitudes amongst children. Group
Processes and Intergroup Relations, 14,
193-207. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1368430210390535

Paluck,
E. L. (2009). Reducing intergroup prejudice and conflict using the
media: A field experiment in Rwanda. Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, 96,
574-587. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0011989

Tagler,
M. J., & Cozzarelli, C. (2013). Feelings toward the poor and
beliefs about the causes of poverty: The role of affective-cognitive
consistency in help-giving. The
Journal of Psychology, 147,
517-539. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00223980.2012.718721